


Summer Without End

by prodigy



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - Martin
Genre: Gen, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:03:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prodigy/pseuds/prodigy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon their fostering was an endless summer: until the War of the Usurper came.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summer Without End

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Syncopation in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge.

In the winter they lived in the Gates of the Moon; in the summer they lived in the Eyrie. At twelve and fourteen Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon had known they had other homes: if anyone asked them about said homes they unhesitantly replied _Winterfell_ and _Storm's End_, because they knew what that word meant, home. Home was bloodlines to be proud of and fathers to do proud: fathers named Lord Rickard and Lord Steffon. They could name those too. They were good sons, were Ned and Robert -- in particular Ned, upon whose thin shoulders the weight of being a good son settled unusually heavily. Robert would tease him about it; _Stark_, he'd always call him then, _I'm going to call you Stark now, Ned, until you remember you've got any other name. It's all about the North for you, isn't it! Do you know, I've never heard another Northman natter on so much about the North._

_You don't know many Northmen_, said twelve-year-old Ned seriously into his soup. Across the table in the High Hall of the Eyrie Jon Arryn looked upon them with amusement.

_I know plenty of Northmen_, boasted Robert.

_Let me think_, said Ned, furrowing his brow to pretend at thought. _Oh, I've got it. Are they --_

_Ned --_ Robert warned, laughing.

_\-- Eddard Stark, Ned Stark, Stark, and Ned?_ he finished with an utterly deadpan look of inquiry.

Robert hit him with his spoon. Ned feigned long-suffering tolerance, to which Lord Arryn shot a glance of wry reprimand, to both of them. At the time Ned privately hadn't understood why _he_ deserved reprimand, but he understood later with a fair bit of embarrassment. Ned Stark, always acting the elder and the higher-ranked. It wasn't that he wasn't deferential. He was very deferential. There were few things more important, and more pounded into his head, than deference. It didn't necessarily mean that he wasn't acting above his station, as Lord Arryn meant to teach him, and as he only learned long after he'd turned his back on the Eyrie for Winterfell for the very last time. As a boy Ned made a veritable career of being patient and level-headed: it had always served him well with Robert Baratheon. At first with Robert it had been mere practical necessity, the pragmatism needed to temper the hot blade of Robert's impulsive and willful nature.

Now it was a routine, his own play-weapon against Robert's fiery temperament when they sparred in word and action. Robert was charismatic; Robert was charming. Ned was reasonable. Ned was mature. It wasn't long before attendants made jokes as to who the true elder of the two was -- and not long before Jon Arryn took note and with only mild concern tried to remind Ned that honor dictated not only deference, but holding one's betters in true high regard, in word and will and spirit.

Ned had always considered himself humble; humility was important to him. But then again --

Then again, he was young then. They both were.

They had homes elsewhere. Great Houses that would call them back eventually. That called them back increasingly often, as they came of age. Robert complained of Storm's End's gloom when he came back to the Vale in the springtime and Ned with him: that gloomy old hole, he'd mutter, and Stannis and Renly's company! He always attested that his brother Stannis Baratheon was the only boy the Stormlands had seen that made Ned Stark look positively charming. Ned returned that his brother Brandon Stark was the only boy the Northlands had seen that made Robert Baratheon look positively level-headed.

They'd sparred over that, laughing. They sparred over a lot of things. They had homes elsewhere. They _lived_ at the Eyrie and the Gates of the Moon.

At fifteen and seventeen they first came to understand the military difference between the two keeps: the Eyrie, tall and winding and impregnable, was a true marvel of architecture and of warlike design, and a true headache to maintain and live in comfortably for most of the year. The Gates of the Moon were stouter and kinder, but faster to fall -- _everything_ would be faster to fall than the Eyrie, men of the Vale would boast, and Ned had to admit they were right. Even his own Winterfell. After years in the South he conceded there was nothing especially remarkable about Winterfell, aside from that it was Winterfell.

But they never _understood_ the difference, because there was a very specific way that Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon understood the difference between the Eyrie and the Gates of the Moon: by sparring. They sparred their way through their fostering together -- from their first days, when they were suspicious of each other, to their best days, when they thought no one had ever had a friend like the other, to their most painful days, when they were brothers. No one had ever considered Ned a boy suited to war, but he'd taken up training-arms as often as Robert; he was no brawler, but they danced with sticks and then blunted swords around the training-yard of the Gates of the Moon almost as often as they spoke. Or around the moonstone Lady's garden in the Eyrie, sticks clashing, bruising and drawing blood, Robert full of laughs and Ned full of concentrated silence for a while, then laughs when one of them went down. This was how they knew the two keeps: the Gates, where they could train and spar at will, and the Eyrie, where they had to restrain their laughter at the irony of sparring right under the window of the lady's chambers, having to be careful not to nick the weeping statue of Alyssa Arryn.

They were boys and the difference between the Eyrie and the Gates was this: the Gates were better for training, but the Eyrie had a better view. It wasn't summer or winter; their time with Jon Arryn had been one long, endless summer, where they had the luxury to be boys, be children, though they hardly knew it at all when the difficulty of sparring in the Eyrie and Robert's smittenness with Ned's sister Lyanna seemed like very adult matters indeed.

As children they sparred, and as Robert grew more confident and charming, bigger, stronger, less of a hothead and more of a burning fire -- and as Ned grew more observant, more of a thinker, even stronger-set in his honor -- they were still children, though older children. They sparred their way through their childhood; through their youth; through even the end of their youth, if Ned protested slightly of taking up this game when such grim things were afoot elsewhere on the continent. And even when Rhaegar Targaryen had run off with Lyanna, when Robert had been red with anger he took up the training-sword to vent it against Ned and Ned parried and resisted to indulge him; even then they could solve their problems like boys, though more than ever they were convinced they were men.

Even at Brandon Stark's arrest, when Ned was grim with worry, Robert came to him and offered him the chance to fight -- "don't worry, Ned," Robert had said with an awkward clap on the shoulder, "your father'll sort it out, he's got to be Lord Stark for something, hasn't he. The King'll listen." Then: "Let's go have a match. I can't stand you sitting at the window like that, it gives me vertigo. I'll hurl myself out the Moon Door." And Ned had accepted.

It was at the end of this endless summer, when they were fighting in the Lady's garden again, dancing around the very solemnly weeping statue, dishonoring that historical memory for a dishonorable last time, when the footman had slipped out into the garden; Robert didn't notice and nearly tripped over him, but Ned did and called out "Robert, watch your step."

The footman looked nervous to speak to them. That was the first warning.

"Lord Arryn would like to speak to both of you."

"We're preoccupied," said Robert, breathless.

"Now," said the footman.

They came to the high hall, footstep after footstep on the moon-white marble. The dais loomed over them taller than Ned had ever remembered it, though he was taller now than he had ever been, too; on it sat Jon Arryn, for a moment as baleful and forbidding as King Aerys himself. Robert looked bold. Ned wondered if he looked afraid. And -- that was the funny part, wasn't it -- and they were still holding their training swords at their sides.

Then Jon's face fell and he just looked tired, their tired old second-father, bearing some kind of weight that he did not seem to have the strength for any more. Strange that he wasn't looking at Robert yet. Just at Ned.

"Ned," he addressed him, "your father and brother Brandon are dead. Executed by the king."

It seemed as though the halls of the Eyrie loomed up impossibly tall and painfully white around him then, shining pale into his eyes like it hurt him, like teeth, like bone.

"King Aerys has demanded both of your heads -- for insurance against your vengeance."

Robert stared. Ned felt he fell further into this impossible hole of white; in retrospect, it had never occurred to him that Lord Arryn could easily have betrayed them. Even that had been a naivete.

"It's war, then," said Jon Arryn, and now he didn't sound like the Lord of the Eyrie, but a tired father again. Resigned. Like he had never considered anything else.

It was Robert who stared, whose horror lasted the longest; perhaps the Eyrie's white hall had devoured him whole for even longer. It was Ned who came to ground again and saw things very clearly: Robert next to him, a silly training sword in his hand. The messenger from King's Landing, uncomfortable in the doorway. Jon Arryn on the Lord's seat. Himself, standing in a pair of commoner's boots in the High Hall, Lord Stark of Winterfell.

"So it is," he said quietly.

In the Eyrie somewhere there would be a pair of training swords: covered with rust and dust, unused, left behind. Or maybe they had been given to new trainees long since. Or melted to scrap and reforged into something new: into knives or vambraces, or pots and pans, or chain. Summer was done. Winterfell and Storm's End had new lords each, and the Eyrie no more children -- for until then it had kept Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon, until then Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon had sparred in its courtyard. That Ned and Robert were hung up on the wall with their swords: or given away, or melted into something else.

And scarce anyone other than Lord Eddard Stark of Winterfell remembered that they had existed -- and every time he saw King Robert after the Greyjoy Rebellion, he saw them fade.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Cori C., my much-harried beta as always.


End file.
